I've been using the madwifi-ng driver in Portage for my laptop's Atheros AR2413 based wireless network card for a number of years without any major issues.

Recently, this driver has been masked in Portage due to the following:

Quote:

[...] madwifi has been replaced by ath5k and ath9k in kernel drivers and is subject to numerous long standing bugs [...]

I therefore opted to try using the ath5k driver in its place.

Initially, it appeared to work OK, but I soon began to notice a strange problem whilst browsing the web, where some pages would often refuse to load, timing out for no obvious reason. I managed to narrow the problem down to pages accessed using HTTPS (or with such content embedded in them).

After eliminating the web browser and network connection as the possible cause of the problem, I decided to see if it was the wifi driver by unmasking and reinstalling the madwifi-ng driver. Once I did that, the problem went away. With both drivers compiled as modules, I can switch between the two and see the problem appear and disappear, so it is definitely only present when using the ath5k driver.

I'm not sure if this problem is being caused by the ath5k driver itself or if it is indicative of a problem elsewhere that doesn't manifest itself when using the madwifi-ng driver.

Whilst I can continue to use the madwifi-ng driver for now, I'm a little worried that it will be removed from Portage in the future, so am keen to try and resolve the problem I experience when using the ath5k driver so I can move over to using that driver.

So, no-one has any idea where I can start to investigate this problem? Even a pointer to where to contact the ath5k driver developers would be helpful (the websites I've found for it appear to be defunct).